Earth could be entering global cooling for the next 30 years

According to many scientists, Earth is in a current "cold mode" and will see temperatures fall over the next 30 years as the world enters a "mini ice age."

For several years, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change has urged governments of the world to take action to prevent global warming from becoming more of a serious threat than it already is. Climate scientists, governments and green activists have blamed man for climate change and, therefore, want the populations of the world to change their behaviour to make it more environmentally-friendly.

However, many scientists believe the Earth is going through a global cooling trend and will be for the next 30 years, at least according to Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany's Kiel University and an author of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Latif spoke with the Daily Mail and said the globe will be in a “mini ice age,” which will see temperatures across the world dip in the 30-year period.

Latif says, reports DNA India, that the current cold weather is a 30-year break in the global warming cycle, which assumes the possibility that temperatures may rise quickly in the future.

The scientists’ analysis is based on the natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which is contradictory to other scientists' belief that the North Pole will be free of ice by the summer of 2013. However, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, arctic sea ice has increased by more than 26 per cent, or 409,000 square miles, since 2007, reports the Washington Times.

Latif has developed new methods to measure ocean temperatures 3,000 feet below the surface, which is where both the cooling and warming trends begin. These predictions are not new, though. In 2008, Latif and his research team of scientists published the findings in 2008 and then again in September of 2008 at an IPCC conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

Even though countries as south as Cuba experienced cold weather, many dismissed it as short-term with no long-term consequences but, once again, Latif disagrees and has evidence to refute the view. The current freezing temperatures are because of Arctic oscillation but Latif’s team’s research shows that this turns into a long-term shift, which is known as the Pacific and Atlantic multi-decadal oscillations.

"A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent. They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer. The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.”

Head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, Professor Anastasios Tsonis, also concurs that MDOs will be a significant factor to determine global temperatures, reports Daily Mail. “They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather, and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st centuries. We have such a change now.”